Freak Accidents
by Checkerboards
Summary: Tentacles, polymorphs, and mutants! Where does Gotham get those wonderful freaks?
1. Splat!

_This one is dedicated to everyone who tried out for Who Wants to Be a Superhero? and claimed that they got their powers from a freak accident. Apparently, there were up to seventy freak accidents in the St. Louis area alone last year. (Hey, don't look at me. I got _my_ powers from a genetic mutation...)_

* * *

Some cities are known for their excellent cuisine. Some are known as the home of a certain ball team, or a famous site in history, or maybe even just a place to have a rockin' good time.

Gotham was informally known as the Home of Freak Accidents. Now, to be fair, Gotham did house hundreds of scientific institutions, and accidents happened to everyone. There was not a scientist in the world that hadn't done something stupid with chemicals. Generally, though, the farther up the chain you went, the more deadly the accidents became.

Except, as has already been said, in Gotham. Accidents that should have killed people didn't. If you were careless in the lab, you were virtually expected to have a horrible mutative incident and put on a costume. It's just how life went.

* * *

Imagine a dark alleyway, if you will. It's about three in the morning, so the only ones out and about are the night people. The alley is small and narrow. Steam is rising from a sewer grate. Garbage cans jostle for position against the tall, dirty walls.

A car screeches to a halt at the mouth of the alleyway. It's a fairly normal car in an odd shade of brown. Where the streetlights hit it, the colors ripple angrily across the rooftop.

_Not_ a normal car, then. And judging by the trio of men shoving a fourth out onto the pavement, not ordinary passengers, either. The car growls off into the night.

Allow yourself to picture the consistency of wet pink sand. Imagine picking up a handful of that gritty almost-liquid and allowing it to spill through your fingers onto a sidewalk. Now imagine that the sand is in a mass weighing approximately four hundred pounds and you're very close to imagining the splatted mess of a being that had just met the sidewalk in a very personal way.

The sand rippled and rolled on the sidewalk. A trembling pseudopod glopped out of the sand and grasped a fire escape. In an almost eerie silence, the sand oozed upward until it was a roughly human-shaped mound. A nearby alley cat, tail fluffed with suspicion, fought the urge to run until it could make absolutely certain that the weird thing wasn't going to give it food.

The damp mound of sand bent downward, as if examining the wide, flat base that supported it. Two vast legs slowly appeared, with intense effort, and the sand being crept forward. This was okay. It could do this.

Something had happened to it - it wasn' t sure quite what - but it would find out. It hadn't always been sand. It had a very clear mental image of feet that did not resemble shoddy sand castles. A shock of something that wasn't quite pain and wasn't quite an itch scraped across its side. The bulbous, gritty head peered nearsightedly down at the newspaper stand jammed into its left leg. It shook it free with a disgusted grunt and plodded into the street, where there was room to move.

Cars squealed to a halt and hit reverse as it stalked toward them. A sandy mouth appeared in a grin. Now _this_ was more like it! It trod the streets and waved menacing tentacles at a frightened prostitute clutching a lamppost. It reached for her and she screamed...

All in all, things might have gone better for the sand creature if the next vehicle to turn the corner had not been a street cleaner. There was a thud, followed by a _whoosh_ing noise, and the gravelly suction of sand rattling up an industrial-sized vacuum cleaner.

And then, with no idea of what lurked in his truck, the street sweeper continued on to his next stop: the paved trails of the dog park.

* * *

The first day on the job is always intense. There's so much to pay attention to, and so much to remember, and if something goes wrong you're _certain_ to get in trouble for it. As time passes, though, and as people grow more accustomed to their jobs, that intensity drifts away in favor of a kind of casualness. If it's business as usual, and if that business has been drilled into someone's head until they could perform it in their sleep, it tends to turn into mere busywork as they discuss matters of importance with their colleagues.

This also held true for crimefighters - particularly when their foes were small, soft, and unsure of how to use their particular physical attributes to their greatest advantage.

"Does it seem like there's been too many of these recently?" Robin panted as he vaulted over a weird half-human-half-squid.

"Of _these_?" Batman growled, punching a similar-looking tentacled horror directly in the squishy bit that normally would have housed a face. The thing chirruped like a startled finch and smacked into the sidewalk.

"Not just these," Robin said, stomping hard on a stray tentacle. "All these...I dunno...mutants?" he suggested as the last one rolled a huge, desperate eye at him. Batman whipped a bola around it, tying the tentacles into one big chunk of flailing tissue. A fountain of ink sprayed wildly into the air, splattering heavily down on Robin. "Why do they always hit _me_?" he groused, wringing out his cape.

Sirens wailed at the end of the street. A flotilla of cop cars screeched to a halt at the edge of the black-splattered sidewalk full of groaning cephalopoids. Commissioner Gordon, the one dark spot in a flood of yellow Haz-Mat suits, squinted into the darkness, hoping to catch one last glimpse of the vigilantes before they disappeared.

At that point, though, they were already twenty stories up and accelerating. Robin dripped onto the roof and shook his head, spattering ink all over the clean cement of the garden rooftop. Batman had a tiny palmtop computer in one hand, typing a query with the corner of his armored knuckle. "You're right," he said without preamble. "That was the third new mutation this month."

Robin raked inky hair back with his gloves, scowling as the green kevlar disappeared under the slimy squid secretions. "So where to now?"

The palmtop closed invisibly with a tiny _click_. "Dawn's in two hours. It'll have to wait until tomorrow," Batman said, readying his grapnel.

"Why? What else do we have to do tonight?"

"One of them told me where their boss is."

Given that the average henchman was just about as willing to divulge the location of the hidden lair as a schoolboy was willing to attend Advanced Calculus 401, Robin had a feeling that the hapless squid had been..._persuaded_ to tell with the judicious application of a fist or two. As he followed Batman off of the rooftop, the news penetrated the bit of his brain that was all too aware of what he'd already been through that night.

_A boss. That means...a _big_ squid. And a big squid means about a pondful of ink._

Quietly, with the wind whipping his dripping cape wildly behind him, Robin wished once again that he'd remembered his waterproof underwear.

(_to be continued_)


	2. Friend!

Crime increases as the nights get warmer. It is a rule that holds true in nearly every city in the world, excluding those where winter is defined by slightly fewer people getting sunstroke. And so it was that springtime, a time traditionally associated with love and bunnies and new life, was more personally seen in the Wayne household as a time to put on the extra_-_bulletproof armor and hope that no one got _too_ seriously hurt on their little outings.

In between the usual offenders' fun and games - Ivy's perennial battle with humanity, the Riddler's never-ending battle of wits, and Croc's habitual battle to pull a heist without totally fouling it up - Batman and Robin investigated every lab that they could sneak into. They'd been in nearly half of Gotham's labs at this point, with no sign of anything illegal.

Rather, anything _unexpectedly_ illegal. A few of the pharmaceutical labs had mysteriously sprouted secret rooms containing all sorts of highly illegal happy chemical brain-death, and one or two smallish general labs were caught synthesizing toxins and poisons for the busy criminal mastermind on-the-go. One lab, which was suspiciously over-inhabited at eleven PM, seemed like a sure thing for information - that is, until Batman and Robin burst in only to find a bunch of henpecked men playing poker in the staff room.

Finding the cause for all these mutations was going to be tediously difficult, particularly since new mutants showed up every few days. Besides, the newspapers hadn't reported many accidents lately, and of those, every single person that had been seriously injured had ended up in the hospital. The Bats were no strangers to tedious difficulty - in fact, that was basically the description of any detective's life - but they simply didn't have any more time to waste in empty labs. If they couldn't find the cause, they'd just have to search out an effect...

* * *

The sand creature had had a terrible couple of days. Picking itself out of the garbage dump had been...well, it imagined that a solid person would have been incredibly revolted to roll around in that kind of filth, let alone have it forced deep into their cellular structure. Taking a bath in an abandoned bathtub full of rainwater had seemed like a great idea, at first - until it realized that it had dissolved into a helpless puddle of thin sandy soup. But as the sun baked the water right out of it, it was able to re-form enough to glop onto the ground, leaving only a thick blob of hideous brown sludge in the bottom of the old tub.

It had padded back into town, looking for...what? It couldn't remember. It couldn't remember anything - a home, a family, a name - and the lack was very irritating. If only it could remember, it reasoned, it could go home and figure out what had happened to it!

Going out in the daytime had been almost as bad an idea as taking that bath. All it wanted was to look around in peace, which it could hardly do if cars insisted on throwing themselves into screeching piles of metal when it had barely stepped onto the sidewalk. Sure, it was _fun_ to see all that shiny metal go _crunch_, but it had business to attend to! It was on a mission, and it was in no mood to deal with crashed cars or screaming people. It had given up and settled on an abandoned rooftop, where it could watch the world go by and wait for everyone to go home.

It had been there long after sunset now, dangling sand-lumps over the edge of the roof in a crude imitation of legs. The wind fluttered something made of fabric in the darkness behind it. It ignored the sound, focusing on the tiny thread of memory that it had managed to coax out of its sandy brain. Something about...silver. Something shiny and silver.

"What are you doing?" a voice growled angrily from behind it. It was just as attention-grabbing as the fabric noise had been. What was silver and shiny? "Answer me." Shiny, silver, and...it had a tail! Wait, what was a tail?

The grinding _skrunch_ of a fist connecting with its side drove it out of its reverie. It twisted its head necklessly around to regard a black-caped figure scowling as he tugged at a fist that was jammed inside several hundred pounds of living sand. It looked down at the man with mild interest. Then, with sand rippling in a shrug around its shoulder region, it turned its head back to look down at the street far below. Shiny. What was shiny?

A black metal thing on a rope whizzed out of the darkness and wrapped around its neck. It plucked the metal thing up in two pincers, loosening sand around the rope so it could draw the thing closer to its eyes, and examined it. It was a black...mouse? Bat! It was a bat! A black, sharp, shiny...a shiny thing with a tail!

"What happened to me?" it asked the man trapped arm-deep in its side. The man paused in his struggles and looked up at him. "You've got the shiny thing!" it said excitedly. "I remember a shiny thing! It...it didn't look like this though." It wilted. "It was smaller. What's wrong?"

"My arm," the man growled softly.

"Oh! Sorry." It loosened the sand enough so that the man could pull his slightly crushed arm free. "But do you know what happened to me? I mean, why I'm sand?"

"What were you before?"

"I...I don't know," it said. "A thing like you, I guess. A...a man?"

The man in black flexed his fingers experimentally. "_Who_ were you before?"

"I don't know that either," it said dejectedly. "I don't even remember my name. You have a name, don't you?" it asked wistfully.

"Batman."

A tiny tease of memory tickled its brain. There was something familiar about that...it sighed."That's a nice name. I wish I had a name."

"We could call you Sandy," came a voice from the fire escape just below the rooftop. Batman and the newly-christened Sandy leaned over to see Robin's cape sticking out of a puddle of shadow in the corner of the walkway.

"You have a friend!" Sandy said, delighted. In one swift move, sand coiled around the young crimefighter and lifted him into the air. As Robin came into view, they could see that his skin was splotched with reds, greens, and yellows. "Hello!"

Robin wriggled as politely as possible. "Can you put me down?" he hinted, looking at the fifty-story drop below his feet.

"Sure!" Sandy agreed, setting him gently on the rooftop next to Batman.

"I thought I told you to stay in the car," Batman said grimly.

"To watch the _Condiment King_?" Robin snorted. "He'll be out for another two hours, at least. Besides, the car's locked down."

"What's a Condiment King?" Sandy asked.

"Don't ask," Robin grumbled, swiping at a bit of dried relish on his arm.

"Can you remember anything?" Batman asked. "Any names? Dates? Places?"

Sandy concentrated. "The shiny thing...it was little, and kind of round," it said, forming a relief picture of the shiny thing on the surface of a vast sandy hand. "And it had a long tail..."

The vigilantes examined it. "Like a locket?" Robin asked.

"Yeah! A locket!" Sandy beamed. "And...a striped shirt?..." It shook its head slowly. "I don't know. I thought for sure I knew who I was earlier, but it turned out that I was just thinking of some movie." It brightened. "Do you two watch movies? Do you want to go see one?"

"Maybe later," Robin said cautiously.

Batman twitched a fold of his cape away from his ankles."You remembered a movie?"

"Yeah! I mean, I remember _seeing_ a movie. In a theater," it added. "It takes a while. I'm still trying to figure out how to make the sand in my head work. It's like, I see something, and then the sand remembers where to go on its own. I know it works like that," it continued excitedly, "because I saw some people walking, like you, and then I remembered how to do it with legs and everything!" It lurched to its feet, gesturing excitedly as they morphed into something very similar to a pair of Bat-boots. "See, look how good I am!" it announced, proudly raising one foot off of the ground and standing for a moment in a pose reminiscent of a ballerina in an arabesque.

A warm summer breeze blew gently around their ankles. Sandy, who hadn't quite yet remembered how to balance, waved frantic arms as the wind pushed it off of the rooftop. A rope with another shiny bat-thing on the end whipped around it again. This time, though, the rope went taut when it fell too far - and the rope promptly jerked right through the sand of its middle and cut it in half.

The bisected bits of Sandy hit the ground with a double _wham_ as the crimefighters followed it earthward on grapnel hooks. Sand splattered over the street, mounding in the pair of craters it had made when it had landed. The sand rippled and slowly gathered itself back up into Sandy, who grinned a relieved smile at its two caped companions. "I'm okay!" it said cheerfully.

Batman put a hand to the left pointy bit of his funny-looking hat. "It's Joker," he said tersely to Robin. "At the diamond exchange."

"Can I come?" Sandy asked excitedly. "I want to meet your friend!" It was taken aback by the icy glare of rage directed in its direction.

"Stay on the roof," Batman growled angrily. "We'll be back for you. Just _stay here_ and don't get into trouble, all right?" He readied a grapnel.

"Let's go!" Robin chirped happily.

"You're not coming either."

"But..." Robin protested.

"Condiment King's got to go to Arkham. I can handle the Joker," Batman said, launching the grapnel and sailing away into the night.

Robin sighed and rolled his eyes. "Just so you know, Joker's not _anyone's_ friend," he informed Sandy.

"Well, can I come with _you_?" Sandy looked back up at the rooftop so far above them. "It's lonely up there."

"We'll be back tomorrow, okay?" Robin said, patting Sandy with a friendly hand. "You can hang on until then, right?"

"I guess," Sandy muttered, slumping into a dejected pile on the ground. When it looked back up, the boy had vanished. It sighed and slouched over to the fire escape, pulling itself effortlessly back up the floors with a pair of pseudopods. Stay here? When everyone else was out having fun? Sandy sulkily shoved itself up onto the rooftop and sprawled in a heap, staring upward at the stars. Well, waiting until tomorrow wouldn't be _too_ much trouble...if it _had_ to wait that long.

It smiled as a bright speck of light shot across the sky. Maybe tonight wouldn't be so boring after all.

(_to be continued_)


	3. Discovery!

Very few things in this world are as frustrating as waiting for someone. As every moment passes, with every footstep on the pavement or car tire squealing around a corner, there's that constant mix of anticipation and dejection as whatever's making the noise turns out not to be the long-expected person.

Sandy had been waiting on the rooftop for a whole day, counting the minutes until its new friends showed back up. There hadn't been much to do up there. It had tried to make friends with a pigeon, it had tossed pebbles at a TV antenna, and it had done the hundred-and-one other pointless activities available to someone trapped on a deserted rooftop.

As the sun slowly drifted down below the buildings, casting shadows into the streets, lights began to flick on one by one in the building across the way. Ah! A chance for entertainment! Sandy leaned forward, resting its head on the edge of the roof, and started trying to guess which window would light up next. That one? No, the one below it flipped on, revealing an excess of fat man with a minimum of clothing. Maybe this one? No, it was two floors up, illuminating a woman with a cluster of children cavorting around her like cannibals around a stewpot.

Sandy watched with interest as the woman deftly avoided being accidentally kicked, hit, and bodyslammed by the impatient youngsters as she manuevered a large box to the table. She opened it, revealing a beautiful fluffy cake with icing in every color of the rainbow.

Food! People ate food, didn't they? Sandy had forgotten food. It wondered if maybe it could try eating something. Could it make sand into tastebuds? It giggled as the woman picked up a toddling infant and gave him a kiss on the cheek before exaggeratedly showing him the cake.

The woman gestured to one of the older children and said something. The boy in the bright blue shirt obediently dashed to the window and pulled it open. "...and make sure you feed your hamster!" the mother ordered.

"Sure, Mom."

"Mamamama!" a little girl chirped. "Can we listen to the radio? _Pleeeeease_?"

The mother smiled indulgently. "Sure, honey. You remember how to do it?"

"I know," she said, indignant that her four-year-old competence was being questioned. The girl scampered across the room to a cheap-looking radio and spun the dial. Music wafted into the evening air.

Sandy wasn't listening. Instead, it was staring wide-eyed at the stereo. It had had a stereo like that! It remembered playing with the dial to try and find a good radio station on hot summer days, back home in...in...It growled with frustration. The memory was right _there_!

Maybe if it got a little closer, it could figure it out. With a slight frown of concentration on its face, it sent a tentative stream of sand across the road to land softly on the rooftop. The long tube of sand swayed gently as the breeze slipped across it. Then, as if it was being siphoned, Sandy slowly transferred itself to the neighboring roof.

Pleased at its success, Sandy lowered itself on two slowly lengthening arms down to the woman's apartment. It found itself dangling in front of a bedroom filled with pictures of men and women in brightly colored, tight-fitting clothing. _Superheroes_, it remembered. _They're called superheroes_. Oops. The window it had wanted must have been a little further to the left...

The boy in the blue shirt strolled into the bedroom, carrying a large container of something labeled Ham-Treats. "Hey!" he gasped, noticing Sandy dangling outside like a curious pinata. "I know you!"

"You do?" Sandy said, excited.

"Yeah! You're the Sandman! I've got a picture of you on my wall!" The boy pointed at a six-by-three mural of an armada of caped and masked figures, posing heroically on a variety of backdrops. "This is so cool! HEY MOM!" he bellowed into the other room. "The Sandman's here!"

"I'm coming, Jake, hold your horses." The woman from earlier, still toting the baby, came into the room. "Now, what's all the - oh!" She tucked an errant strand of her hair behind one ear. "Um, can I help you?" she said shyly.

"Yeah!" the boy said enthusiastically. "Are you chasing down a villain? I could help! You need a sidekick, right? I've got a cape right here-"

"Jake, honey," his mother interrupted. "Let him talk."

If Sandy had had a lip, it would have been biting it. It was pretty sure that it wasn't a superhero, but...well, if the fib would get it inside, that was really all that mattered. "Can I look at your stereo?" When both the mother and the boy gave it disbelieving looks, it added "It's important."

"Okay," the mother said. "Come in."

Sandy flowed inside. "That is _so cool_," the boy gushed as Sandy reformed into something vaguely human. "C'mon, the stereo's over here!" He grabbed Sandy's hand and tugged him through a little hallway into the main room, where the stereo rested on a wobbly table.

Sandy reached out and spun the dial. "Hey!" the little girl protested. "I was listening to that!"

"Shh!" Jake hissed. "Don't worry about my dumb sister, Sandman. She doesn't know what she's talking about."

"You're the dummy, you stupid-head!" The pair of siblings started squabbling. Sandy ignored them, focusing on the feel of the dial in its sandy fingers. It was...well, it was familiar, certainly, but no new memories were springing up. Sandy sighed with disappointment and turned away. The rest of the apartment was filled with things - toys, pictures, a television - but nothing that seemed familiar.

"Get off me, Christy!" Jake snapped to his sister, who was wrapped around his leg and endeavoring to bite his kneecap off. "Well? Did you find what you were looking for?" he asked Sandy anxiously.

"No," Sandy said disconsolately.

"Oh," Jake said. "Do you want to stay for dinner? It's my birthday," he added, pointing to the cake. "Mom's making sloppy joes!"

Sandy peered at the cake. A sky-blue Batman swung over a sugary skyscraper, with a cherry-red Robin close on his heels. "Hey!" it said, perking up. "I know those guys! I met them last night!"

"But you work with them all the time!" the boy said, surprised. "Don't you?"

"I, um..."

"Are you really _the_ Sandman?" the boy demanded, a suspicious squint scrunching his little round face.

"I'm made of sand, aren't I?" Sandy said desperately.

"Sandman turns _into_ sand. Turn back into a guy if you're really him," Jake commanded.

Oh drat. "I, um...I can't."

"So you're not a superhero?" the little girl said, disappointed.

"Well...maybe..." Sandy said defensively. Being a superhero wasn't _entirely_ out of the question, after all. It did have no idea where it had come from, and wasn't a superhero even sort of likely?

The woman was looking at Sandy with a touch of panic now. Mutants in Gotham were _never_ harmless. They were either villains or heroes, without exception. No mutant had ever acquired superpowers and kept working at Burger King. "What do you want with us?" she asked shrilly.

"I just wanted to look at your stereo!"

"Well, you did," Jake snapped. "Now go away if you're not really the Sandman. I shoulda known no one _cool_ would ever come here."

Sandy, stung, slouched back over to the window. "Happy birthday, anyway," it muttered as it flowed back outside. It heard the woman slam the window shut behind it and rattle the blinds closed. With drooping shoulders, Sandy readied itself to stretch back up the building and return to his perch on the neighboring rooftop.

_Wait! If that lady had a familiar stereo...someone else might have something familiar too!_ Sandy brightened. Just because it'd been kicked out of one place didn't mean that it might not be welcome in others...and that key memory was _certain_ to be lurking somewhere around here!

* * *

"I told you to _stay here_," Batman growled, pacing around the quivering heap of sand on the rooftop.

"I was just trying to remember!" Sandy whined. "I wasn't trying to _scare_ anyone!"

Batman gave it a look that could have scorched liquid magma. "You broke into fourteen different apartments," he pointed out.

"I didn't break anything! The windows were open!"

"Tell that to the police," Batman said, arms folded.

"Look, I'm sorry! They made those loud noises and scared me, and I fell!"

"Right onto one of the cruisers," Batman growled. "And you crushed another two when you were running away, not to mention the streetlights, the fire hydrant, and the hot-dog stand."

Sandy melted into a dejected puddle. "I didn't mean it," it protested softly. Sand shifted in a little mound, revealing a jingling bunch of slightly warped bullets. "I didn't remember what the bangs were until they shot me. Why's everyone so afraid of me?"

Batman, never a source for sympathy, ignored the question. "You've got to be more careful," he warned. "You're already on the waiting list for Arkham, innocent intentions or not."

Arkham. Memories fireworked in Sandy's head. Oh, yes, that sounded _very_ familiar. Something about going to Arkham.

"I know!" Sandy yelped, surging upward. "I know where to go!" It wrapped sandy psuedopods around Batman and took off, arcing from roof to roof in a sandy shower as fast as it could manage.

A full twenty minutes later, they arrived in a seedy, filthy part of town. Sandy dropped into the alley behind a ramshackle bar, with a gloweringly angry Batman buried almost to the nose in its sandy arms.

Sandy snaked a bit of itself through a hole in the grubby window and looked around. The bathroom was caked with every sort of dirt imaginable. Spiderwebs clustered on the ceiling acted as largely ineffective fly-traps while little brown dots on the floor indicated the presence of larger, furrier vermin living under the sink. The room's lone occupant was swearing quietly to himself as he attempted to roll a dollar bill into a small tube.

Sandy rattled the window with a tiny tentacle. The man looked up from his work, saw a sand-creature and Batman looming in the alleyway outside, and scrambled out of the room as if he'd seen a ghost. Sandy unlatched the window from inside and oozed in, carefully easing Batman through so that he didn't bump his head. It set the vigilante down and pulled the sand back.

Batman, once more able to talk without a gag of sand, glowered at Sandy. "You brought me to a _bathroom_?" he demanded coldly.

Sandy flung an arm out and pointed at an address scrawled on a broken tile. "I went there!" it declared. "I went there so I would go to Arkham!"

"You went there," Batman repeated slowly, "so you could go to Arkham." He frowned. "What does that mean?"

"I...don't know," Sandy admitted. "I just remembered that to go to Arkham, you had to go here first." It tilted its head to the side quizzically. "What's Arkham?"

Batman examined the address. In scribbly Sharpie underneath were the words _Ask for Cigarettes._ "This isn't far from here," he muttered. "Come on."

* * *

2978 Third Avenue turned out to be a lavish-looking apartment building that had fallen into disrepair. Batman ran his gloved hand down the list of names, looking for the right one. "There," he said, pointing at the occupant of the penthouse. "Philip Morris."

"Yeah...but how'd you know that?" Sandy said. "I mean, I remember it, but...you've never been here."

"Can you climb up there?"

Sandy looked up at the rotting building, full of balconies and cracks in the brickwork that could lend a toehold. "No problem."

"Then follow me." Batman retrieved a grapnel gun from his belt and fired upward, catching the hook on a protruding cherub just below the penthouse. He clipped the gun to his belt and shot upward like a rocket.

Sandy followed, swarming up the building like a pile of mice. "What the-" a young, redheaded woman gasped as it set a foot on her balcony.

"Sorry," Sandy called, proceeding upward. When it finally reached the top, Batman had already pocketed his grapnel.

"Go in," he ordered.

"What? Me?" Sandy protested. "Why?"

"You're invulnerable, and they probably know you," Batman said. "Go on. I'll be behind you."

"Well...okay," Sandy said tentatively. It slipped through an open window and looked into the darkened room. "Hello?" it called.

"What? Who's there?" a voice snapped. Lights flared brilliantly as someone pounded into the room. "What do you think you're - oh, it's you." The man sounded let down, as if a promise made to him had been broken. He smiled. "Back for your things?"

"I have _things_?" Sandy asked, intrigued.

"Sure. Back in the lockers." The man tugged on his labcoat and waited for Sandy to move. It didn't. "You remember where they are, right?"

"I don't remember anything," Sandy admitted. "Who am I? Who are you?"

"Oh," the man said softly. "Well, it takes them like that sometimes. It's so hard to pin down the side effects before they happen..."

"Side effects? Them?"

"You paid us to become...more than you were," the man said, sliding his hands into his pockets. "I wasn't around for your particular...transformation, but I do remember your request going onto the books. It was tricky, certainly, particularly since one of the chemicals was rather hard to obtain." He smiled. "We've sorted out our supply problem now, thanks to some...generous ex-patients of ours with a little more time on their hands."

"Oh," Sandy said, still confused. "But who am I?"

"What you have to understand is-" the doctor said. He was unfortunately interrupted by the sudden burst of shattered glass that marked the Batman's entrance into the conversation. "You brought _him_?" the man howled.

Batman, meanwhile, had swooped behind the man and grasped him firmly by the collar. "You're going to tell me everything you do here," he hissed.

"I won't tell you...anything," the man squeaked as his feet left the ground.

"_Tell me_," Batman growled.

"Okay! Okay! We just wanted to make some money!" the man screeched. "It's not a crime to help people! They _wanted_ to be changed!"

"You turned half-a-dozen men into squids last week," Batman accused.

"Yeah! I mean, they paid us five grand each, we did what they told us! I - _erk_!"

"And you were responsible for the giant iguana three weeks ago?" Batman tightened his grip. "The one who went into a coma across Dini Drive and died two days later?"

"Sort of! I mean, we did the change, but we didn't know he was diabetic!" The man squirmed as Batman threw him onto the ground. "Everyone wants powers! Everyone wants to be special! And we only charge what's reasonable!" he wailed. A sudden look of cunning came into his eyes. "Even _you_ could use superpowers...right?" he asked. "For free?"

In the blink of an eye, he was on his stomach with a very heavy boot on his neck. "I don't _need_ superpowers," Batman growled.

"Right! Right! Whatever you say!"

The subtle squeak of rubber on tiles sent Batman whirling around to bat the raised syringe away from the man's sneaky cohort. "And _that_ trick is overplayed," he snarled, sending the new man to the floor with a solid kick to the solar plexus.

Sandy, meanwhile, had disappeared into the door labeled Locker Room. There were two rows of lockers lining the walls, and it was methodically opening each and looking for its belongings. The doors were locked, but what did that matter?

It calmly wrenched another door out of its hinges and tossed it on the pile. The locker was empty. Sandy reached out, tugged another door free, and stared at the contents of the little locker.

This was it. This was what it had been looking for! A small, silver pendant gleamed on a tiny thread of a chain. Sandy slipped it onto itself and dug into the pile. Pants, a shirt, tennis shoes...it slipped itself into them and trotted over to the nearby floor-length mirror.

No...the shirt was baggy where it shouldn't be, and it bulged in weird places, too. Sandy smoothed itself out beneath the fabric, letting its body fill the clothing like jelly in a mold. It blinked.

There, in the mirror, was a rather statuesque woman. "I'm a girl?" Sandy whispered to herself, running gritty hands over her clothes. A finger found the bulge of a wallet crammed into a pocket. She flipped it open and pawed through the contents.

The memories burst open like milkweed pods. She knew where she lived, who she was, and most importantly, why she'd come to be changed. Her sizeable family had been gangsters - all of them - even her little brother, only thirteen but a crack shot with a handgun. They'd taken over half of Gantry before anyone knew they were there. And to teach them a lesson about upstart families moving in on their turf, the Falcones had wiped them all out in one explosive evening of violence.

Sandy had been knocked unconscious and left for dead in the vicious fighting. When she'd come to and discovered that her family was gone, she'd sworn revenge. And what better way to fight the sprawling hordes of Falcones than by becoming a shapeshifter, someone who could be different every time she killed one of them? They'd be jumping at shadows and suspecting each other every moment. It would have been perfect.

She hadn't intended to be turned into sand, though. How was a giant blob of sand supposed to disguise itself as anyone? She gently stroked the locket on her neck. Well, at least they'd gotten the invulnerable part right...

Sandy crept back into the main room, where Batman was repeatedly banging a doctor's head on the floor, and slid out the window. Go there and go to Arkham? Yes, indeed, particularly once Batman found out her identity. Mutants went to Arkham as a matter of security, and ex-gangster sand creatures would definitely find themselves on the padded bus to the nuthouse if they let Batman catch them.

Maybe she'd kill the Falcones, maybe not. But first, in order to honor their memories, she had to remember her family. With all the loneliness in the world weighing down her shoulders, Sandy slipped down the building and finally went home.

* * *

_Author's Note: Thanks to Ghost in the Machine for letting me know about the existence of DC's Sandman. _

_Tune in next time for the final chapter in 'Reciprocity' followed by 'Reinventing'. Thanks for reading!_


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